Although Coe's effort is generally regarded as the longest sentence in English-language fiction, it begins to read like John 11:353, alongside the 40,000 or so words Polish novelist and political dissident Jerzy Andrzejewski (1909-1983) managed to put together, unbroken by fullstops, in his 1960 novel "Bramy raju" (The Gates of Paradise), written as a retelling of the Children's Crusade of 1212, and containing in its entirety, remarkably, only two sentences, in a wonderfully excessive example of the elegant variation every English teacher looks for with the advice that you should always mix sentence lengths because reading sentence after sentence of equal length rapidly inspires ennui. (The other sentence is very short.)